A New Uplink Multiple Access Based on OFDM With Low PAPR, Low Latency, and High Reliability

Abstract

This paper proposes a new physical layer architecture based on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) for uplink multiple access. It aims at high reliability with fixed decoder latency targeting emergent low-latency wireless applications, such as transmission of control information in machine-to-machine (M2M) and device-to-device (D2D) communications. Our proposed system is based on the judicious combination of subcarrier hopping and super-orthogonal convolutional codes for achieving high coding gain and frequency diversity, together with Golay complementary sequences for low peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) signaling. The low PAPR nature improves the power efficiency at a power amplifier (PA) and thus contributes to the transmission range enhancement. Furthermore, by introducing non-orthogonality among users through the assignment of the same set of subcarriers to multiple users, the overall spectral efficiency can be improved. In order to suppress multiple access interference caused by the non-orthogonal overlap of users, multiuser detection (MUD) is employed. Theoretical expressions of approximate bit error rate for the proposed system with MUD are also developed. Numerical results reveal that our proposed system achieves higher reliability and higher spectral efficiency than the conventional orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA)-based system.